Germaine Richier

78 TATE MODERN LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 79 Along with her contemporary Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier, the French artist Germaine Richier created bold Chessboard, Large Version sculpture that reflected the existential angst of (Original Painted Plaster) 1959, plaster and metal post-war Europe and influenced a generation of young British sculptors Natalie Ferris on Germaine Richier In 1957, discussing her own work, the sculptor and etcher Germaine Richier (1902–1959) reflected upon an artistic practice that had long negotiated the savagery of conflict and the fragility of the human spirit: ‘Our age, when you consider it, is full of talons. People bristle, as they do after long wars. It seems to me that in violent works there is just as much sensibility as in poetic ones. There can be just as much wisdom in violence as in gentleness.’ Perforated, shorn of musculature, or buckling under the strain of their own distended bodies, her bronzes emerged from the furnace of a beleaguered post-war France. Along with her contemporary, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, with whom she was frequently compared, Richier explored the new image of humanity in an era freighted with continued privation and existentialist angst. And yet the apparent violence committed to these bodies, from the corrosion of their surfaces to the distortion of their limbs, is also a matter of alchemy. In curious, 80 TATE MODERN LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 81 mystical compounds reminiscent of surrealist artists The fact that she is not as well known today Max Ernst or Wifredo Lam, her figures adopt strange as Giacometti may be because of her gender. new growths or bearings – sprouting fibrous wings, She nevertheless received international acclaim acquiring spindly insect legs, budding branches or throughout her lifetime. Schooled in the Western urn-like handles at their temples, and developing classical tradition by two assistants to Auguste mottlings of vibrant colour. Richier appears to ask, Rodin in Montpellier and Paris, Louis-Jacques through such metamorphoses, what lies at the Guigues and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, she featured extreme reaches of the human body. at Venice Biennales and was awarded the sculpture This tension, between the figurative and the prize at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951, while her fantastic, reached its peak in her late great work work was shown in major galleries across Europe Chessboard, Large Version (L’Echiquier, grand) 1959, and America throughout the 1930s to 1950s. produced in the same year as her premature death Richier’s advocates included David Sylvester and currently on view at Tate Modern. The grouping and the poet Francis Ponge, and her social circles of five anthropomorphic figures, to which Richier in Zurich and Paris comprised the artists Jean tirelessly returned throughout the final four years Arp, Giacometti, Marino Marini and Fritz Wotruba, of her life, reworked in varying scales, patinas and as well as the writers André and Bona Pieyre de arrangements, represents the principal pieces in a Mandiargues and Nathalie Sarraute. Her influence in game of chess: the king, queen, bishop, knight and Britain was particularly profound. She first exhibited rook. In the original smaller-scale 1955 version, the in London in 1947 at the Anglo-French Art Centre, pieces were arranged on a board of scrap iron that a show which has been credited as a source of the she worked into with clay. Here, the larger plaster skeletal figures and brutalised forms of the ‘geometry figures have been freed from their chequered base of fear’ sculpture of the early 1950s, inspiring British and mounted on free-standing plaster supports to artists such as Reg Butler, Bernard Meadows and present a far more precarious equilibrium. As a late Eduardo Paolozzi. In 1950 her work was again used to evolution in her work, the application of colourful explore the connections between French and British paint to the surfaces forms radiant lines that appear art in London–Paris: New Trends in Painting and to course through the nerves, arteries and bones Sculpture at the ICA, alongside Robert Adams, of each figure, charging them with a sense of their Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Hans Hartung, Peter potential for movement. ‘A form lives to the extent Lanyon and Isabel Lambert. Her impact gave rise to to which it does not withdraw from expression,’ the Sylvester’s striking assertion in 1955 that: ‘Nobody, artist noted in 1959, and this installation honours her perhaps, occupies so central, so crucial, a position unwavering commitment to the eloquence of gesture. in contemporary sculpture as Germaine Richier.’ Born in 1902 in the small village of Grans near Some of her most intriguing sculptures Salon-de-Provence, southern France, Richier construct an environment above, beneath or around moved at the age of two with her parents and her the figures. Wood, bronze or stone are used as four siblings to Castelnau-le-Lez, near Montpellier, pedestals or as proscenium-like surrounds, while where she spent the rest of her childhood on the a number of her forms are attached to given points family estate, Prado. There is something of this in their surroundings by fine rods of bronze. In 1951 primordial landscape in her work: the archaic myths, and 1952 she invited the artists Maria Helena Vieira religious convictions and fables that issued from da Silva and Hans Hartung to paint backdrops to two the region blend with the parched earth, spidery of her sculptures – La Ville and La Toupie respectively. vines and glaring sunlight. She established a Richier’s own working environment was itself connection to the natural world from a young a spectacle. Looking at photographs of her in age, as her family were millers and vine growers, her studio, many of which were taken by Brassaï, accepting the cycles of change and decay, flight we see a potent physical presence amid a pageant and predation, life and death. of forms. A stocky, broad-shouldered woman, A pilgrimage to Pompeii in 1935 marked with roughly cropped dark hair, a direct gaze and perhaps the most profound moment in Richier’s forceful, ready hands, she vitalised her material. creative life, impressing upon the young artist the In an age of talons, Richier directed all of her efforts iconography of human endeavour and a sense of towards clawing back the essential resilience of the bodies as blasted, organic, open material. This human form. interlacing of the sacred and the profane eventually got her into trouble when her commissioned altar Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster) is on view crucifix, the emaciated Le Christ d’Assy 1950, was Top: Germaine Richier’s Chessboard, Large Version (Original at Tate Modern. La Ville 1952 with lead Painted Plaster) installed at the exhibition Top: Germaine Richier in her studio Germaine Richier on the moved from the altar to another part of a church backdrop painted by Maria Germaine Richier, Musée Grimaldi, Natalie Ferris is a writer based in Oxford. She is currently completing with one of her favourite models, beach at Saintes-Maries-de- in Haute-Savoie. Helena Vieira da Silva Château d’Antibes, Antibes, 1959 a DPhil thesis on abstraction in post-war British literature. Antonio Nardone, Paris, 1954 la-Mer, winter c1954–5.

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